Khmer "Larga Sombra"

$14.00

Format

Format

LP - Black

Qty

This first full length release by Madrid’s hard working KHMER is a pulverising blast of blackened d-beats and huge, melodically led, almost stadium-crust riffs. These 8 tracks showcase an inherent understanding of dynamic effect, flowing between super fast Grindcore hyper-blasts, the aforementioned air-punching d-beats and reverberating atmospheric post-sludge interludes with a smoothness and strong sense of purpose. No song overstays its welcome, the longest being the 5 minute title track ‘Larga Sombra’, and the whole album maintains its pace throughout, creating a sense of tension and urgency even in their atmospheric moments. The band draws from a cocktail of the genres and sounds mentioned previously, compressed and flitered through their personal perpectives to create a noise that is truely their own. A focus on the self is present throughout the release, in lyrics primarily dealing with concepts of loss, isolation and bleak moments of chilling sorrow. This theme is strongly reflected in the art that accompanies the album which was created by vocalist Mario C. Vaises and recalls work by illustrators such as Derek Hess and Niklas Sundin among others.

The musical production is extremely clean, with very tight and punchy drums cutting precisely through the mix along with sharp high-gain guitars and a growling, distortion-tinted bass under-pinning the whole release, it is an impressive testament to the recording and engineering skills of guitarist Ivan Ferro (the album was recorded at his studio, Kollapse Studio, Lugo) that the band sounds so balanced on this release.

This is a crushing first album with a great attention to detail, consistent themes and tone with enough musical variety in its 25 minute run-time to satisfy any fan of high energy blackened crust or metalpunk!